January 2006, Week 2
-- Teeny Tiny Disk Drives

We've been trying out a new 8-gigabyte disk drive the size of a
large postage stamp. Expect to see a lot of these in the near future.

The one we're working with is from Seagate
and has the largest capacity we could find among those currently
available. You can also get drives of this type, up to 6 gigabytes, from
Hitachi. They're 1-inch disk drives, but the outer case measures 1.5 by
1.5 inches (4 by 4 centimeters) and three-sixteenths inch (half a
centimeter) thick. Let's face it, that's small.

The drive is designed to fit into many of the
newest digital cameras. You can tell which cameras because the package
will carry a notation that they accept "CF+" or "Type II" cards; the
letters stand for Compact Flash Plus. You can also recognize cameras
that accept these cards by looking at the card slot, which will be
roughly twice as thick as the slots for flash cards.

Plugged into a camera, Seagate's 8-gig card
will hold over 4,000 photographs at 4-megapixel resolution. Even if you
take high-definition 8-megapixel photos, the drive will hold more than
2,300 of them. These numbers are absurd, of course, but not so absurd if
you turn to saving video and not just still shots. Most digital cameras
can also take video now, some for 30 seconds or more. The card can hold
eight hours of MPEG-2 video, which is DVD quality.

If you have a flash card reader that accepts
the CF+ size card, you can plug it into the computer and essentially
have a removable hard drive. Interestingly, we just got a new card
reader from Edge Tech (www.edgetechcorp.com).
It handles this kind of card and a couple of others. You would plug the
card reader into the USB port on a Windows XP or Macintosh computer,
plug the Seagate drive into one of the reader slots, and as far as the
computer is concerned you've just added an 8-gig hard drive.

We
found Seagate's 8-gigabyte 1-inch hard drive for $250 at Radio Shack; a
4-gigabyte version sells for $120 at
Amazon.com (Do a search on "Seagate Compact Flash"). The Edge
Tech card reader sells for $50, but that's because it docks an iPod. You
can use it to view photos on your TV, or listen to muisc on external
speakers If you don't want those features, you can find similar card
readers for less than half the price. Neitehr device requires a power
supply, drawing the current it needs through a USB cable attached to the
computer. .

Opening Up With Open Office

OpenOffice 2.0 is a free program that offers essentially
the same programs and features as Microsoft Office, which ranges in
price from around $80 for the student/teacher version to $400 for the
standard version.

You can get
OpenOffice as a free download from
www.openoffice.org. Or you can get it on a disk that comes with a
book, "Point & Click OpenOffice.org" by Robin Miller; $30 from Prentice
Hall ($20 from Amazon.com ). That's
the way we got ours, and we think it was well worth it because of all
the useful tips and easy-to-follow instructions, including videos. The
book comes with OpenOffice for Windows or Linux, take your choice.

The book takes a project approach to
learning OpenOffice. You create an advertising flier, a slide show, a
spreadsheet and a database. There are sections for beginner and advanced
users, and both are very readable.

We learned that in OpenOffice you can add a
cartoon thought bubble to a photo or drawing just by clicking on one at
the bottom of the screen. MS Word has this feature as well, but to get
to it you have to choose a shape from the shapes menu. OpenOffice also
lets you drag an image and drop it anywhere on the page, which you can't
do with Word. And you can turn any document into a PDF, so that it
retains its formatting.

On the downside, we had some trouble
creating business cards in OpenOffice, but doing it in Word was also
awkward. If you want to make business cards, it's easiest to do it in a
free program you can get from Avery (www.avery.com).
Or use a template from
http://documentation.openoffice.org.

Most important, any OpenOffice document can
be saved as a Word document, any spreadsheet can be saved as an Excel
file, and any presentation can be viewed by PowerPoint users.

I Clone, You Clone

Online gamers will like this one. Many
online games allow players to create their own characters. Now, with
iClone, they can even put their own faces on them. We used it to turn
Bob into a 3-D warrior in just a few clicks.

The same technique can be used to
personalize animated characters in chat rooms. You might enjoy using it
to put a face on cartoon characters on a Web site, or in screensavers
and mobile phone displays.

Moving beyond faces, you can import whole
scenes with background music. If you want to experiment a bit, there's a
free trial of this at
www.reallusion.com. The standard version of the program is $80. The
advanced version is $180.

Numbers Report

The blog is turning into the blob, a giant
phenomenon reaching tens of millions of people. According to the latest
Pew Internet report, 7 percent of the 120 million adults in the United
States using the Internet have created a blog or Web-based diary -- 8
million people. A surprising 27 percent of Internet users read blogs.
The top 400 blogs reach 50 million people.